AlienVault Goes Live With Latest Open Threat Exchange

AlienVault, a provider of security management tools and threat intelligence solutions, has launched an updated version of its Open Threat Exchange (OTX).

The latest offering, OTX 2.0, has been available in beta since April 2015, and is modeled on social sharing technologies to enable security practitioners to openly research and collaborate on emerging threats, correlate data better and quickly implement that threat data into their own security systems.

On the technology side, OTX leverages a big data platform that combines natural language processing and machine learning to automate the collection and correlation of threat data from multiple sources, such as third-party threat feeds, blogs, external API and local agents, AlienVault explained.

OTX 2.0 users can create or subscribe to what the company calls a “Pulse,” which provides an analysis of a particular threat, including information on IoC, impact, and targeted software. Pulses can be exported in various formats such as STIX, JSON, OpenloC, MAEC and CSV, and they can be used to automatically update local security products to ensure that system are protected against the latest threats.

Additionally, using the new AlienVault DirectConnect API, users can automatically download threat data and IoCs from OTX.

“We are excited to see hashes and domain matching alongside IP in near real-time correlation with our client data,” Grant Leonard, co-founder of Castra Consulting, said in a statement. “We enjoy direct current information on what we are seeing right at our fingertips. This single innovation is really what helps us find the ‘right now’ threat vectors for our clients.”

“We created the Open Threat Exchange on a core belief of strength in numbers,” said Barmak Meftah, president and CEO of AlienVault. “It has been shown time and time again, that if we work together as a community and freely share threat information and resources we can identify attacks sooner and react quicker, before they become devastating breaches. A collaborative defense is the only way to get ahead of the attackers. Security wins when we go on the offensive.”

For more than 10 years, Mike Lennon has been closely monitoring the threat landscape and analyzing trends in the National Security and enterprise cybersecurity space. In his role at SecurityWeek, he oversees the editorial direction of the publication and is the Director of several leading security industry conferences around the world.